“Since the Obama administration and its negotiating partners struck the deal with Iran in July 2015,” Joshua Keating recently wrote in Slate, “the Middle East’s sectarian conflicts have only become deeper, more violent, and more intractable. From the half-million people killed in Syria to the rise of ISIS to the massive refugee crisis that has strained the world’s humanitarian capacity to its breaking point and contributed to the rise of right-wing populists in the West, it’s much harder now to say that Obama made the right decision in prioritizing the Iran deal above all else.”

No one who has been reading Tablet even casually over the past four years can be surprised to learn that Barack Obama’s signature foreign-policy initiative wasn’t just an arms agreement. It was an instrument used to rebalance U.S. interests, downgrading traditional allies like Israel, as well as Saudi Arabia, and upgrading Iran. The hope, Obama told an interviewer, was to create a geopolitical “equilibrium … in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.” Given the poverty of that hope, it should hardly come as a surprise that instead of the airy and ever-elusive notion of “geopolitical equilibrium” there is instead mayhem....